Forgotten Flatbush

This arial view of Prospect Park South (above), perhaps the best known of all the Flatbush developments, dates to approximatly 1908, shortly after the Brighton Beach Railroad tracks (which now service the B and Q trains) was submerged at the request of influential local residents.

One of the most impressive homes in Prospect Park South, was the enormous mansion purchased in 1920 by Isarael Matz, founder of the Ex-Lax company. After years of neglect, it was consumed by fire in 1958. The lot was subsequently pruchased by the owners of an adjacent house on Marlborough Road. It is now a lovely, private garden.

To the east of the Brighton Beach Railroad tracks in the same photo are several large, detached, frame houses. These gracious homes, along with hundreds of others, were bulldozed over the course of the last century to pave the way for the brick apartment buildings that now crowd the streets bordered by Parkside Avenue to the north, East 17th Street to the east, Beverly Road to the south, and Flatbush Avenue to the west (MAPS). In contrast to the large-scale developments of frame houses constructced in other parts of Flatbush, most homes in this section, as well as down the Flatbush Avenue corridor, were built on a block-by-block or house-by-house basis.

An early twentieth century image of the Fourth Unitarian Church (below), an arts and crafts gem which still stands on Beverly Road, depicts the porch of a neighboring Victorian home on East 19th Street. A recent photograph shows the same church engulfed by post war, multi-story apartment buildings.

While this northern portion of Victorian Flatbush may have lacked a catchy name, the magnificent homes that lined Ocean Avenue between Parkside and Beverly were considered by contemporaries to rank among the finest in all of Flatbush, as were those on St. Paul's Court. This view of Albemarle Road in Prospect Park South (right) depicts two houses (background) which originally stood on East 17th Street, between Church Avenue and Beverly Road.

was founded in 1889 solely as a lawn tennis club. As membership grew, the facilities expanded to include a 400 seat auditorium, two billiard rooms, four bowling alleys, men and women's locker rooms, and a sun room. The club produced several tennis players of national reputation. For several years a golf link and a baseball team was also maintained by the Knickerbocker. Intoxicants of any kind were strictly prohibited.

*The information and most of images for this site was taken from The Realm of Air and Light: Flatbush To-Day (NY, All Souls: 1908). Futher information was obtained from two Flatbush Development Corporation publications, The 2005/06 Guide to Victorian Flatbush and the Guide to the 2005 Victorian Flatbush House Tour.

At the end of the nineteenth century, Flatbush was still a sleepy village deeply rooted in its Dutch colonial past. Less than a decade later, thousands of massive, wood frame, single family homes dotted the landscape, transforming what had previously been farmland into a self-proclaimed "Mecca" of Victorian suburbia - New York's very own version of Boston's prestigious Brookline.*

"Modern Flatbush, with its beautiful streets, handsome homes and impressive buildings, is to-day generally regarded as the most attractive and desirable place for residence in the great City of New York," remarked Edmund D. Fisher, in his introduction to the 1908 publication, The Realm of Light and Air: the Flatbush of To-Day.

Sandwiched between Prospect Park South and Caton Avenue, just below the Parade Grounds, is the neighborhood known today as Caton Park. Caton Park was constructed street by street by several well known Flatbush developers. Flatbush of Today refers to these relatively modest five- to seven- bedroom homes as "Cottages North of Prospect Park South."
Originally overlooking the Parade Gounds was the now defunct

The Northern border of what is today considered part of Beverly Square West is visible at the far left of the arial photograph of Prospect Park South. These homes, however, actually predate Thomas Benton Ackerson's Beverly Square West developement by several years.

The "jewel in the crown" of this neighborhood was, without question, the exclusive cul-de-sac Tennis Court, situated off Ocean Avenue, between Church and Albemarle. Not one of these magnificent homes survived the population boom of the postwar years, all having been razed to make way for high rise apartment buildings.

The name "Tennis Court" referred to the Knickerbocker Field Club (pictured below),

Only a handful of the Victorian homes in the northern reaches of Flatbush, in one bastardized form or another, survives today. Four of these houses are on Crooke Avenue; another, encased in cement, is on East 21st Street, between Church and Albemarle:

Their numbers are dwindling frighteningly fast. Earlier this year, the last two freestanding frame houses on Ocean Avenue between Church and Albemarle were demolished:

Amazingly, the Knickerbocker Field Club (below) perserveres, as six municipal tennis courts, wedged between post-war high rises and the the railroad tracks, and which are easily visible from the window of a passing Q train traveling between Beverly Road and Church Avenue stations.

The bucolic setting, numerous churches, country clubs, parks, recreational facilites, state-of-the-art railroads and utilities, attracted the educated professional classes, as well as the seriously wealthy, including the Gillette, Guggenheim, Hellman, Carter Ink and Fruit of the Loom families.